Nutritional Endocrinology Practitioner Training (NEPT)
Clinical Pearl
April 10th, 2016 

Think Functionally

It’s really tempting to start to grasp for protocols for symptoms and diagnosed conditions that your clients present with. After all, you want to serve them and find solutions.

I still hear a lot of, “What should I do for this or that condition,” as if it’s the condition that we are supporting, not the client.

We’ve been trained to think that way. Conventional medicine thinks that way. We mostly grew up in a conventional medicine model (except for a few lucky ones among us whose parents were ahead of their time).

Indeed, I do give you done-for-you “protocols” for many “conditions”. But in reality, those protocols are reminders about the condition, the questions to ask your client, and the thought process.

So when a new client presents, I want you to get into the mode if thinking about the person, not the symptoms.

What do the symptoms indicate? What body systems may be at the root cause of the imbalance? What foundational diet and lifestyle areas are out of balance? What was the set of events that led up to the person experiencing the set of complaints?

All of these are important questions to ask, and indeed 90% of the answers come from taking an excellent history. Yet many practitioners tend to skip over the history taking so they can jump into fixing.

Remember: your job is not to fix anyone.

Your job is to determine what’s in the way of your client’s inner healer – what’s keeping her or him from doing their job? Ask and you shall receive.

Ask the right questions to the client and also do the labs and other documentation they provide. When you can put it all together and make sense of it, that’s when you are on a path that will lead them to true healing.

 

I am excited to be in the process of revitalizing the Master Health Tracker spreadsheet to contain forms you can use to map out your client’s history and interventions. It’s so valuable to be able to always keep their health picture close at hand without having to memorize their findings.

It will be presented at the retreat for sure, and hopefully before.

If you haven’t completed Modules 5 and 7, History Taking and Physical Exam, dive right in as soon as they are open to you. If you have, I suggest you review.

The new Master Health Tracker will give you a place to consolidate and analyze client information and refer back to it easily. I struggled for years with paper forms and a variety of online documents, word files etc. I find the Master Tracker the easiest way to keep it all in one place!